DAY 2 OF OUR 4,600 MILE ROAD TRIP

It's now day 2 of our road trip and we woke-up to the sun rising from the east with beaming light shining right through our tent. It took us a minute to fully wake up from all the partying we did the night before and when I say that, I mean watching a movie on our blow-up mattress from REI haha. We finally got up and let Cruze "Our mini Aussie" run around and do her morning business "Yes, we pick up every poop she does" After her jumping and running around we started to pack up camp and get the car organized again but before that, we made a quick cereal breakfast. The heat started rising pretty quickly and at this point, we had no shade to cover us because the tent was already packed up and at this point, we didn't have an awning on the car so we got fancy and moved our REI chairs to the west side of the car to sit in some shade which worked pretty good because the chairs sit so low. After we munched and munched on our cereal we packed everything else up and hoped in the Subaru to hit the road. We were sitting there for a minute to decide which way to drive. We could have just hopped back on the 10 freeway or we could drive through a part of Joshua Tree towards 29 Palms and that's what we did actually and by doing there we were able to stop at my in-laws in Lake Havasu to say hello and double-check on the lug nuts on our black rhino arsenal wheels because we just got them mounted and after checking them and just double-checking everything before we go any further it was time to say our goodbyes and hit the road again because at this point we would be dropping down into Sedona from Flagstaff around midnight.

Leaving Lake Havasu as we head to freeway 40 we stopped and topped off with gas so we wouldn't have to until Sedona. I don't let my gas go under a quarter tank ever. We've been on the road for a few hrs. and we're finally passing through a part of Flagstaff and we jumped on 89A to head to Sedona. Once again, it was pitch black outside and we couldn't see anything at all besides what the headlights and fog lights could light up. After driving for a little bit we started to notice that the rock walls from the mountains were getting taller and taller and closer to the 2 lane road and we started hitting switchbacks. I was like, man.... I would love to see what this looks like during the day time. We were winding back and forth for a while and finally got into Sedona where we stopped at a gas station to fill up just to have peace of mind because from here we were headed out to the backcountry of Sedona which we had a pin drop of an area our friend stayed at.

Not knowing what this area looked like from the pin-drop we left the gas station and started heading down the road until we came to the fire road we had to turn down. Soon as we got onto the dirt road I again took off the rally light covers so we could cut through the night. As we're driving down the dirt road we kept seeing campers, RV's, Tents, etc almost in every single pull off so we were shocked at how packed it was in the backcountry. After driving for about 45 minutes we finally find our spot ( 34.90286, -111.91128 ) We saw some cooler spots the next couple of days but that's what we had to work with. Again, at this point, it's around 1 am and pitch black outside. Anything outside of our light beam you couldn't see. We got camp set up pretty quick and just went to sleep for the rest of the night.